Cars, Neighbors and Convenience

As Los Angeles inexorably grows, our love/hate relationship with the car is becoming more intense.

While we embrace our own car and the freedom it affords us, we tend to resent the cars of others for increasing traffic on the streets, polluting the air, clogging the freeways and snapping up parking spaces.

The car, in effect, has become the ultimate self-interest machine, distorting the relationships of individuals to their neighbors, neighborhoods, city and region. As such, it also has become the major determinant in the planning and design process.

In the proposed siting and shaping of buildings and their convoluted reviews by local authorities, architectural style is quite secondary to such issues as how many parking spaces are provided and whether the surrounding street system can handle the increase in traffic. It is the stuff of conflict.

Almost everywhere, it seems, communities are at war with themselves, local businesses and government and, most of all, real estate developers, over traffic and the related issue of development. Appeals to bear witness and write commentaries on specific skirmishes dominates the mail I receive.

As readers of this column know, I tend to sympathize and side with the residential communities, prompted by the belief that neighborhoods are the bedrock of a city, the basis for its sense of place and identity, and the measure of its quality of life.

At the same time, there is recognition that neighborhoods and conflicts vary, and what may, on the surface appear similar, on closer examination sometimes differs considerably. And there also has to be concern about the selfishness, hypocrisy and demagoguery that the conflicts seem to stir, even in the warmest of homeowner hearts.

A case in point, sadly, is the debate in my own neighborhood in Santa Monica over the future of Montana Avenue, which in recent years has been losing neighborhood stores to trendy restaurants and boutiques with a regional appeal. Among the results have been sharply escalating commercial rents, increasing traffic and parking problems.

Most residents in the area, including myself, are concerned. We would like to see the neighborhood-oriented services, such as supermarkets, drugstores, shoe repair, flower and barber shops remain, the traffic better controlled, and parking less of a hassle.

Some changes are welcome. I, for one, am glad to see the gas stations there being replaced by stores. The stations were not pedestrian-friendly, generating more traffic than a mini-mall over their raw asphalt curb cuts while belching noxious fumes. Much more engaging, and safer, are sidewalks lined with stores.

In response to concerns over traffic and the need for more parking, in particular to serve the older establishments that have no off-street spaces, the city, to its credit, initiated a study to see whether the avenue could be reduced from 4 to 2 lanes, made safer, and be landscaped to accommodate diagonal parking.

And though the avenue may not be wide enough for diagonal parking on both sides, I felt the study was very much in order, as well as a look at other traffic-mitigating measures, including cul-de-sacs for select streets and alleys, installing more traffic lights and, generally, making it more attractive for pedestrians. Also mentioned was permit parking.

At the same time, a local developer proposed a plan to relocate on the avenue the Sweet 16 Grill, a modest coffee shop that, after 46 years in the neighborhood, had been forced to close because of escalating rents. All that was required was a variance to allow 8 parking spaces below the minimum, at most a possibly mild inconvenience to nearby residents.

The plan seemed reasonable to me, as well as nearly 4,000 persons who signed a petition in support of it, and I mentioned the item in a column last month. The response was some angry letters and phone calls.

Despite the persons bemoaning the loss of neighborhood services on Montana, such as the Grill, they were opposed to the variance because they felt it would exacerbate the local parking problem.

In a letter to the editor, one woman wrote that “while, as he (Kaplan) says, some tables at the Grill may be filled by people who walk, bicycle or skateboard to the restaurant, many also are filled by construction workers with a truck parked outside for each.”

In subsequent letters and calls, and at a meeting last week in a local school called by a self-appointed, so-called Montana Avenue Task Force, it became evident that a vocal group of homeowners was opposed to the variance, to diagonal parking and just about anything that might cause them an inconvenience.

Their opposition displayed a lack of sympathy for the merchants they say they want to help and a lack of understanding of traffic management that bordered on petulance.

Shouting from the audience, a few residents suggested that certain services, such as gas stations, be forced to remain on the street; that commercial rent control be instituted, and that development on the avenue be severely limited. And this from persons who live in a neighborhood where “tear-downs” are going for $350,000, and the second topic of conversation usually revolves around what they bought their house for and what it is now worth.

There was no talk of freezing the cost of merchandise or service offered by the stores, controlling the escalating prices of homes in the area, or of recalculating apartment leases at market rate to reduce the discretionary income of local renters who frequent the boutiques on the street.

Braving the crowd, Santa Monica City Council member Chris Reed noted that gas stations were leaving because they would not upgrade their underground storage tanks to protect the local water supply, that the city could not force anyone to stay in business and that perhaps some of the traffic problem was being caused not by the stores, but by residents and their help living in the “6,000-square-foot houses, with four-car garages” being built north of Montana, and by occupants of “bootleg” rental rooms and apartments there.

For this Reed was booed. It was apparent that the mostly well-coiffured crowd was of the type that does not like to be confronted, nor does it like being inconvenienced by having to drive a few extra yards for a parking space or a few blocks south to Santa Monica Boulevard in search of a full-service gas station.

Said Gina Tognetti, a neighbor sitting next to me who supported the parking variance for the Grill: “These people certainly want to have their cake and eat it too. They won’t compromise, but they want everyone else to.”

For the city of Santa Monica and those seeking some solutions to our increasing traffic problems it appears the road ahead is going to be very bumpy.

Attempting to put the car into perspective last weekend was a 2-day symposium at UCLA. Some provocative thoughts emerged that deserve comment, but lacking more parking space here it will have to wait another time.